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She divorced her truck-driver husband over a dozen years ago and gets no alimony. She earns just under $200 a month as a hospital maid; her $39-a-month, two-room apartment is tidy and her children are neatly dressed. "It's no crime," she says, "to be clean."
KENTUCKY: Blind in Duck Hollow Eb Herald would like to see it, but he can't: the sweet William and May apple and columbine bright on the ledges, the dogwood dotting the green rise to the west, the clear bulge of Duck Creek as it purls over the smooth stones through Duck Hollow. Eb — his real name is Elbert, but one doesn't call a mountain man that — is 56, and he went blind seven years ago. (Degenerative blindness afflicts many Appalachian dwellers as a result of in breeding.) Lank and long-striding in his pale blue bib overalls, his sightless eyes gleaming under a faded brown fedora, Eb stalks his 52 hillside acres mending fences with the assurance of a man born to the slope. His four-room tar-papered house perches on a 45-degree cant with the same defiant certitude. With his wife Louise (pronounced Looeyes, hill style) and five children — two of them his own, two nieces, and a grandchild — Eb Herald survives the year in comparative comfort on $2,868.
He draws $55 a month for disability; the kids are good for $156 more in AFDC; a vegetable garden and a chicken coop housing about 30 Leghorns take care of the rest. There is a TV set in the shack, and a large fray-feathered fowl refrigerator stored with home-bottled pickles, beets, scallions and — two weeks of the month — spareribs or ham burger. Eb wryly remarks that there are advantages to blindness: it gives him an honorable excuse for being on the dole. Since the hardwoods were lumbered off and the deep coal mines virtually gutted in the early 1950s, welfare is about the only industry left in the mountains.
CHICAGO: Nothin' from Appalachia Many white poor who have left Appalachia still return to the "hollers" to sample the hospitality of home, chow down on pokeweed salad and hog jowls, pop a squirrel with the old .22-cal. "hog rifle," or just "swang on the front stoop." Others are totally uprooted. In a second-story apartment on Chicago's North Side, an obese Appalachian woman grunted heavily as she heaved herself off the army blanket covering her bed. She flicked off the stained TV and said: "I've got trouble. My 14-year-old, he just got stabbed in the eye with a knife. The doctor's afraid he's goinq to lose it." Another son, a towheaded boy with a soot-smeared face, gave up playing with his bare toes and rapped the iron bedstead with a broken piece of cast iron. His mother rapped him clear across the room. The woman's husband is mentally deficient and unable to work. Her sons are "waterheads."* The woman said that the knifed 14-year-old had not been treated for six years. "His head is as big as yours," she told a welfare worker. The mother is on probation for threatening to shoot President Johnson.